Ahhh, gingers are in bloom!

One doesn’t even need to see the flowers to know butterfly gingers are in bloom. That scent fills the whole yard.

I don’t know about other gingers, but in my yard, the white butterflies are the most fragrant. They’re also the most likely to fall over. I’ve got them in both sun and shade and they fall over both places.

One day I drove by a house in Aldine where the most gorgeous butterfly gingers were blooming on three- to four-foot stalks. Mine usually topped out about five- to six-foot.

The lady was in the yard, so I stopped and asked if I could buy one of her “shorter” gingers. She laughed. She said she got tired of them always falling over, so every summer when they started “lying over,” she just wacked off a foot or two. Then, she said, in the fall, they bloomed just as usual, but on stronger stalks that stood up straight, albeit a bit shorter than usual.

So that’s what I now do. Only I see a couple in the back that I didn’t whack off. They’re lying over with blooms almost on the ground.

I knew the butterfly ginger flowers are edible and that they’re so called because the flower petals resemble butterflies. But I didn’t know, until I did a bit of research for this blog, that these gingers were used for the treatment of tonsilitis, infected nostrils and fever. Leaves were used to reduce pain and swelling in stiff and sore joints.

5 Responses

I’m in zone 7, North Carolina. My white butterfly ginger has been blooming since September. We’ve had several frosts and a freeze, but the one planted up against the east side of my house (protected spot) is still blooming! It has five, gorgeous blooms today!

It divides easily in the spring (up here). I cut off 8″ sections to transplant.

Modern medicine is, without a doubt, far, far superior to the healers of old who had to rely on tricky diagnoses and what few medicinal plants were available. On the other hand, the focus on man-made treatments has, without a doubt, caused us to forget about and fail to use multiple natural remedies that would be as effective today as they were back then. It’s our loss because we could have the best of both worlds.

I’m near Houston. I’ve had some butterfly gingers appear out of nowhere in my rose bed, which is also infested (?) with ferns. Don’t know the source of the gingers, as I have lived here 8 years, and they just came up last year. They are near a fence that has to be replaced due to Hurricane Ike damage. So I dug them up and healed them in in some big pots. Should I cut the stalks off now? How deep to plant when I get a bed ready? The fragrance is heavenly.

The wonderful thing about gingers is that it’s almost impossible to go wrong, unless you plant them in deep shade or a spot where water stands after a rain — both no-nos.

You could throw those tubers on the ground where you want them to grow and they’ll probably root and bloom for you eventually. But to speed things along, yes, cut the foliage off. Plant the tubers in a well drained, at least partly sunny spot. They don’t need to be planted deeply, an inch or so of soil over them is plenty.

No telling from where they came. Mine appear in strange places in the garden too. Maybe, like lycoris, they wander around underground until they find just the right spot? Just kidding, tho that is what it seems those elegant spider lilies do. Hope this helps. Brenda